MY DEAR PEOPLE,—A Good New Year to you. The year closes, leaving me with £50 in the bank, owing no man nothing, £100 more due to me in a week or so, and £150 more in the course of the month; and I can look back on a total receipt of £465, 0s. 6d. for the last twelve months! And yet I am not happy! Yet I beg! Here is my beggary:— 1. Sellar’s Trial. 2. George Borrow’s Book about Wales. 3. My Grandfather’s Trip to Holland. 4. And (but this is, I fear, impossible) the Bell Rock Book. When I think of how last year began, after four months of sickness and idleness, all my plans gone to water, myself starting alone, a kind of spectre, for Nice—should I not be grateful? Come, let us sing unto the Lord! Nor should I forget the expected visit, but I will not believe in that till it befall; I am no cultivator of disappointments, ’tis a herb that does not grow in my garden; but I get some good crops both of remorse and gratitude. The last I can recommend to all gardeners; it grows best in shiny weather, but once well grown, is very hardy; it does not require much labour; only that the husbandman should smoke his pipe about the flower-plots and admire God’s pleasant wonders. Winter green (otherwise known as Resignation, or the ‘false gratitude plant’) springs in much the same soil; is little hardier, if at all; and requires to be so dug about and dunged, that there is little margin left for profit. The variety known as the Black Winter green (H. V. Stevensoniana) is rather for ornament than profit. ‘John, do you see that bed of resignation?’—‘It’s doin’ bravely, sir.’—‘John, I will not have it in my garden; it flatters not the eye and comforts not the stomach; root it out.’—‘Sir, I ha’e seen o’ them that rase as high as nettles; gran’ plants!’—‘What then? Were they as tall as alps, if still unsavoury and bleak, what matters it? Out with it, then; and in its place put Laughter and a Good Conceit (that capital home evergreen), and a bush of Flowering Piety—but see it be the flowering sort—the other species is no ornament to any gentleman’s Back Garden.’ JNO. BUNYAN. TO SIDNEY COLVIN _La Solitude_, _Hyères-les-Palmiers_, _Var_, 9_th_ _March_ 1884. MY DEAR S. C.,—You will already have received a not very sane note from me; so your patience was rewarded—may I say, your patient silence? However, now comes a letter, which on receipt, I thus acknowledge. I have already expressed myself as to the political aspect. About Grahame, I feel happier; it does seem to have been really a good, neat, honest piece of work. We do not seem to be so badly off for commanders: Wolseley and Roberts, and this pile of Woods, Stewarts, Alisons, Grahames, and the like. Had we but ONE statesman on any side of the house!